Casualties of War

“The Conspirator.”

Robin Wright and James McAvoy in Robert Redford’s Lincoln-assassination movie.Credit Illustration by ANDY FRIEDMAN

Of the many questions posed by “The Conspirator,” and left unresolved, the most pressing are these: How much did Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) know of the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln? How could she not have known of it, given that some of it was hatched within the respectable boarding house that she ran in Washington, D.C.? If her son John (Johnny Simmons), who certainly did know of the plot, had surrendered to the authorities, rather than remaining on the run, could he have saved his mother’s skin? Why did Andrew Johnson, the new President, reject the last-minute, late-night application by Surratt’s lawyer for a retrial? And was there ever any likelihood, considering the public revulsion at the murder, that she would receive a fair trial in the first place?

It is almost a century since D. W. Griffith, in the course of “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), dramatized the same assassination, which in turn had taken place only fifty years before. In “The Conspirator,” John Wilkes Booth is played by someone who looks like Borat, but Griffith’s Booth was played by Raoul Walsh, who went on to become a major director, making movies up to the nineteen-sixties. Such are the seven-league leaps with which cinema connects us to the past. The director of “The Conspirator,” Robert Redford, and his screenwriter, James D. Solomon, spend less than half an hour on the night of the killing itself, but they use the time briskly; whether or not by design, they follow Griffith’s original procedure, right down to the closeup of Booth’s pistol, outside the theatre box, and his daring jump to the stage once the deed is done.

The remainder of the new film is centered in the courtroom, where Surratt and some of her fellow-defendants were tried, and where she was represented by Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy), a young attorney on his first case. Occasionally, we glance beyond: to the office of Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), the Maryland senator and former Attorney General, who takes on Mary’s defense and hands it to Aiken; to the plush environs of the Century Club, which Aiken repairs to in the evening, and from which he is blackballed for the zeal of his defense; and into the unflinching gaze of Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline), the Secretary of War, who sees the case through to its harshest possible conclusion. To the news that those who are deciding Surratt’s fate have made up their minds in favor of clemency, Stanton’s response is one of iron. “Then let us change them,” he says. If the film presents him as a de-facto President, doing the dirty work for his weaker boss (“Keep him away from the liquor,” he says of Johnson on the night of the murder), that is no accident. Kline brings his customary nimbleness of mind to the role, but it amuses him slightly too much, and thus frightens us too little, and he only won the part, I imagine, because Redford couldn’t get Donald Rumsfeld.

Redford’s previous work was “Lions for Lambs” (2007), which was so busy explicating the arguments for and against America’s involvement in foreign conflicts that it pretty much forgot to be a movie at all. Likewise, in “The Conspirator,” one wishes that the director had found the grace to touch upon, rather than belabor, the parallels between the conspirators of 1865 and the present-day inmates of Guantánamo: the humiliating hoods that they are forced to wear, and the adjudicating presence of a military tribunal instead of a civilian jury. Now and then, the dourness takes a break, and I am always a sucker for a good, old-fashioned showdown in a courtroom, especially when the wily prosecutor is played by Danny Huston, who seems twice as mean when he’s trying to be nice. Villains aside, you have to reach back to “Quiz Show,” in 1994, to find a Redford picture that fulfilled its brief to entertain, and, from the opening moments of the new movie—“presented by the American Film Company,” with its logo of a flapping Stars and Stripes—the air is thick with noble intentions. Close your eyes, listen to the music that accompanies the gravely wounded President from the theatre to the house opposite, and you would swear that you were attending not a movie screening but an act of worship.

Is it just because we are in the vicinity of Lincoln that “The Conspirator” acquires its visionary glaze? There is one superb detail, glimpsed in passing, that shows hucksters selling Lincoln memorabilia outside the jail where Surratt is being held, but that flash of the mercenary (and the modern) is never repeated. Most of mid-nineteenth-century Washington looks impossibly neat and clean, unroughened by any sense of war-weariness. It is less in the décor, however, than in the wielding of light that Redford, aided by his director of photography, Newton Thomas Sigel, strives to convince us that the past was not so much a definable place—complete with dirt and sweat, and closely related to our own age—as a distant, glowing planet to be approached with awe. I was hoping that Redford had exhausted his love of soft gilding in “A River Runs Through It” (1992), better known as “The Vaseline Rubs on It,” but the new film bathes in the stuff. Surratt’s prison cell sparkles with motes of decorous dust; tobacco smoke wreathes the courtroom in a silver mist; and, as James McAvoy strolls down a street after dark, the lamplight reflects so blazingly off the cobbles that you can see right through his shins.

All of this, not surprisingly, affects the performances. It’s hard not to like McAvoy, with his glancing nervous energy, but “The Conspirator” rarely permits him to be anything except likable, and the script smooths out any wrinkles in the figure of Aiken. I have read a transcript of his actual closing statement, and it consists largely of what a lawyer friend of mine calls Hiawaffle, gassy with Victorian sententiousness (“the aegis of impregnable legal justice which circumvallates and sanctifies the threshold of home”), and nothing like the terse, abbreviated version we get here. In truth, Aiken wasn’t much of a lawyer, and he doesn’t make much of a hero. We first see him on the battlefield—wounded in the Union cause, and (of course) issuing an order that another man be treated first. Aiken did indeed fight bravely, although you would never guess, from the film, that before enlisting he wrote a letter offering his services to the Confederates. The movie concludes by informing us that, after leaving the law, he became the first city editor of the Washington Post—by a happy coincidence, the newspaper on which Redford himself enjoyed his dramatic apotheosis, as Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men.” How McAvoy would have loved to get his teeth into the more interesting, less unsullied Aiken whom we find in the historical record: the one who, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, was “bound over to Court,” only a year after the Surratt case, for forging signatures on checks.

Still, despite these disappointments credit is due to “The Conspirator.” It may never supply the more troublesome, hard-bitten version of events that is there for the asking, but it does trace a minor, absorbing tributary of the vast Lincoln story, hitherto explored by specialists alone; whether Mary Surratt, for instance, will rate a mention, let alone a sequence, in Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming Lincoln movie remains to be seen. Robin Wright is drawn and dignified in the martyrish role, and you believe in her heart-torn response as Aiken attempts to rescue her, late in the day, by incriminating her son. What mother would agree to that? But she is given perilously little to work with, and Redford seems consumed less by who she was than by what she stands for. If you seek a person, not a symbol, grounded in her period costume and demeanor, try Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Surratt’s daughter, Anna. She has the uncanny look of an old photograph, with her dreamy-stony gaze, as she sits, in a brown dress, on a settee, almost fading into the wall.

Both actresses reserve their strongest work for the climax, in which Surratt and the convicted men are hanged. There are existing photographs of this scene, and Redford summons, with fine exactitude, the original blend of formality and horror. Hence the parasol—not unlike the one flourished by Winnie, in Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days”—that is held over Mary’s head as she walks to the scaffold. No gentleman would wish for a lady to get sunburned, though her neck is about to be snapped. One of the executioners even sports a festive straw boater, as if planning a day on the river. (In Beckett’s play, Winnie’s husband wears one, too.) As Mary is hooded, we switch to her point of view, so that her final sight on earth—like that of a tragic heroine, with the curtain starting to fall—is of a crowd staring up at her in wordless curiosity. Only at the last, at the hour of Mary Surratt’s death, do we feel the full and rousing force of her life, and the iniquity of her treatment under the law. Better late than never, I suppose. ♦

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